Hungarian camerawoman who kicked, tripped migrants gets probation

By

REUTERS

Friday Jan 13, 2017

A Hungarian camerawoman was sentenced to three years' probation late on Thursday for kicking and tripping migrants fleeing police near the border with Serbia in September 2015, the news website Index.hu reported.

Petra Laszlo was fired from her job at N1TV, a television station with nationalist sympathies, after video footage spread online appearing to show her kicking a girl and a young man.

Index.hu reported late on Thursday that a court in the town of Szeged, near the Serbian border, had found Laszlo guilty of disorderly conduct after a hearing in which she testified by video-link. It said she had appealed.

Prosecutors had previously said there were no grounds to charge Laszlo with a racially motivated hate crime.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa passed through the Balkans and Hungary in 2015, en route to western Europe.